This invention relates generally to automatic medication-dispensing systems for use in health care facilities such as hospitals, and more specifically concerns a system for transporting and loading previously dispensed medications into patient bins in a medication cart.
Providing correct medications in a timely manner to patients is an important, if not vital, function of health care facilities, such as hospitals and nursing homes. In most cases, the prescribed medications are picked (collected) by hand in a central pharmacy and distributed to the patients in the facility at specified times during the day. Delivery of medications to the patients is accomplished in various ways. In some cases, medications are provided to patients individually, while in other cases, medications for all patients in a particular location, such as a hospital ward, are delivered and administered from a single medication cart, which holds the medications for individual patients in separate bins or drawers in the cart. Such conventional dispensing and delivery systems are quite time-consuming and prone to errors. In particular, a substantial amount of professional time is inefficiently used in the filling and delivery of medications with such systems.
Various attempts have been made to automate various portions or even the entire medication dispensing and/or delivery process in an attempt to reduce the time involved and substantially reduce errors in the process.
The medication cart itself is often the focus of attention, with various arrangements, such as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,310,199 to Roberts et al, U.S. Pat. No. 5,011,240 to Kelley et al and U.S. Pat. No. 5,314,243 to McDonald et al, some of which include a plurality of patient-specific compartments. Some of these carts attempt to uniquely address individual drawers, which are assigned on a patient-by-patient basis, with various access protection arrangements. Such medication carts have had varying acceptance, although they still must typically be hand-loaded from a medication dispensing location, usually a central pharmacy, or in some cases, depending upon the particular facility, various satellite pharmacy stations which are in turn serviced by a central pharmacy.
In some systems, prescribed medications for individual patients are dispensed automatically on demand from a central dispensing apparatus which includes storage capability for a large number of medications. Many of these systems include software control features linking a hospital computer which has the medication records for all of the facility""s patients. There is typically a wide variance in the sophistication and capability of such systems. One such system is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,546,901 to Butarazi, while other such systems are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,655,026 to Wigoda, U.S. Pat. No. 4,785,969 to McLaughlin and U.S. Pat. No. 4,487,764 to Halvorson. Such systems, while alleging improvement in filling time and error reduction, are often not commercially viable because of manufacturing expense and lack of operational reliability. Even the commercial systems are still subject to errors and are typically not fast enough to adequately service large facilities, in which medications must be provided to a large number of patients at least three times each day.
Hence, while systems which are capable of some form of automatic dispensing of medications on a patient-by-patient basis are available and are used in some health care facilities, there remains significant difficulties with respect to their everyday operation and reliability, and further, they do not provide fast, reliable transporting of the dispensed medications to the bedside of the patient. Even in those systems which have attempted to automate the entire medication dispensing/delivery process, it is this portion of such a system, i.e. the transporting/delivery of the medications, following the automatic dispensing of the medications, to the bedside of the patient, which continues to be time-consuming and, in many cases unreliable, subject to error.
Hence, it is desirable to have an integrated, easy to manage, reliable, automated system for transporting and loading medications in a medication cart after they have been initially dispensed from a central facility.
Accordingly, the present invention is a system for handling packaged medications which have been previously dispensed from a plurality of storage assemblies, comprising: a medication-receiving assembly for collecting medications which have been automatically dispensed from storage assemblies therefor; and means for transporting the collected medications to a medication loading assembly, the medication loading assembly being positioned relative to the transporting means and configured so that the packaged medications move by gravity out of a lower end of the loading assembly to a medication receptacle, such as a bin in a medication cart, the lower end of the loading assembly being configured to guide the packaged medications directly into a selected portion of a medication receptacle.